Climate Change/Mass Extinction Megathread

[crazy canuck]

CC - do you have any idea what level(s) of government would have to get their shit together to start looking at upgrading regional water supply over the next decades?

It has been ongoing for at least 20 years.  There was a big delay in the upgrade of the Capilano system connection to the greater Vancouver system due to construction deficiencies (they had to tear out and redo a major section), but that was finally finished a couple of years ago.  There has been a planned further extension to tap the water reservoirs north of Coquitlam and Mission into the greater Vancouver system.  But that is now some serious money and time commitment.

We are definitely going to experience an extreme draught this year.  Expect watering restrictions and likely prohibitions to be imposed in the spring.

[crazy canuck]

Don't you guys live at the mouth of the Fraser River?  Seems extremely unlikely you're run out of water.

Now things might be rough for agriculture - I know they're having to make some hard choices in southern Alberta about whose water rights might get cut - but it's not like the city won't have water.

That has been considered but rejected as more costly than tapping into the existing water reservoirs in the region.

The problem is that the Fraser is also fed by snow run off.  If there is no snow, that also goes dry.

[Jacob]

Sounds like people are working on it, so that's good.

If people wanted to lend their political support to keeping this a priority, who are the relevant governments? The local mayors and their regional organization + the provincial government?

[crazy canuck]

Sounds like people are working on it, so that's good.

If people wanted to lend their political support to keeping this a priority, who are the relevant governments? The local mayors and their regional organization + the provincial government?

I think this is one that runs across local party lines.  Nobody has a position that water security is not a pressing need.

The main issue is funding - and so that really means the Feds.  Which Federal party is going to prioritize climate change mitigation the most is then probably the choice.  We are past the point of preventing adverse effects.

[HVC]

Cummins fined $1.6 billion for using software to falsify emissions data on over 900,000 dodge Ram's from 2013 to 2023.

[crazy canuck]

Surprising no one, this was Canada's warmest winter ever.

Edit- updated from the Globe

"Over that period, Canada was 5.2 C warmer than average, said Phillips. That's 1.1 degrees warmer than the previous record set in 2009-2010"

[Josquius]

A positive move from France that won't be stopping climate change but does tackle another big environmental problem

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/16/fast-fashion-french-bringing-shein-and-temu-to-heel-can-britain-follow-suit

[Syt]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00816-z

Climate models can't explain 2023's huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory

Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2 °C more last year than climate scientists expected. More and better data are urgently needed.

When I took over as the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I inherited a project that tracks temperature changes since 1880. Using this trove of data, I've made climate predictions at the start of every year since 2016. It's humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists' predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.

For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations. Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened.

For a start, prevalent global climate conditions one year ago would have suggested that a spell of record-setting warmth was unlikely. Early last year, the tropical Pacific Ocean was coming out of a three-year period of La Niña, a climate phenomenon associated with the relative cooling of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. Drawing on precedents when similar conditions prevailed at the beginning of a year, several climate scientists, including me, put the odds of 2023 turning out to be a record warm year at just one in five.

El Niño — the inverse of La Niña — causes the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean to warm up. This weather pattern set in only in the second half of the year, and the current spell is milder than similar events in 1997–98 and 2015–16.

However, starting last March, sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean began to shoot up. By June, the extent of sea ice around Antarctica was by far the lowest on record. Compared with the average ice cover between 1981 and 2010, a patch of sea ice roughly the size of Alaska was missing. The observed temperature anomaly has not only been much larger than expected, but also started showing up several months before the onset of El Niño.

So, what might have caused this heat spike? Atmospheric greenhouse-gas levels have continued to rise, but the extra load since 2022 can account for further warming of only about 0.02 °C. Other theories put forward by climate scientists include fallout from the January 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai volcanic eruption in Tonga, which had both cooling effects from aerosols and warming ones from stratospheric water vapour, and the ramping up of solar activity in the run-up to a predicted solar maximum. But these factors explain, at most, a few hundredths of a degree in warming (Schoeberl, M. R. et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. 50, e2023GL104634; 2023). Even after taking all plausible explanations into account, the divergence between expected and observed annual mean temperatures in 2023 remains about 0.2 °C — roughly the gap between the previous and current annual record.

There is one more factor that could be playing a part. In 2020, new regulations required the shipping industry to use cleaner fuels that reduce sulfur emissions. Sulfur compounds in the atmosphere are reflective and influence several properties of clouds, thereby having an overall cooling effect. Preliminary estimates of the impact of these rules show a negligible effect on global mean temperatures — a change of only a few hundredths of a degree. But reliable assessments of aerosol emissions rely on networks of mostly volunteer-driven efforts, and it could be a year or more before the full data from 2023 are available.

This is too long a wait. Better, more nimble data-collection systems are clearly needed. NASA's PACE mission, which launched in February, is a step in the right direction. In a few months, the satellite should start providing a global assessment of the composition of various aerosol particles in the atmosphere. The data will be invaluable for reducing the substantial aerosol-related uncertainty in climate models. Hindcasts, informed by new data, could also provide insights into last year's climate events.

But it seems unlikely that aerosol effects provide anything close to a full answer. In general, the 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modellers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth's climate system. If the anomaly does not stabilize by August — a reasonable expectation based on previous El Niño events — then the world will be in uncharted territory. It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated. It could also mean that statistical inferences based on past events are less reliable than we thought, adding more uncertainty to seasonal predictions of droughts and rainfall patterns.

Much of the world's climate is driven by intricate, long-distance links — known as teleconnections — fuelled by sea and atmospheric currents. If their behaviour is in flux or markedly diverging from previous observations, we need to know about such changes in real time. We need answers for why 2023 turned out to be the warmest year in possibly the past 100,000 years. And we need them quickly.

[Valmy]

Yeah I think it is temporary due to a combination of the factors listed in the article. But I guess we will see.

[crazy canuck]

Yeah I think it is temporary due to a combination of the factors listed in the article. But I guess we will see.

But as the article makes clear, the factors identified do not account for the warming that was experienced. Something else is going on and that is why they need the data.

[Sheilbh]

Perhaps relatedly, via Joe Wiesenthal of Bloomberg. Through some financial engineering, they managed to make Saudi Aramco ESG


Edit: Incidentally this is part of the reason I'm a little dubious on the power of ESG etc to achieve anything v the state.

[crazy canuck]

BC has the lowest snowpack on record. 63% of normal.

[viper37]

UN report: two years left to reduce emissions and avoid global disaster

And we probably won't make it.

[HisMajestyBOB]

It's just like at school. We'll put off doing anything, then cram all the emissions reductions in on December 31, 2026.

[Josquius]

There is one more factor that could be playing a part. In 2020, new regulations required the shipping industry to use cleaner fuels that reduce sulfur emissions. Sulfur compounds in the atmosphere are reflective and influence several properties of clouds, thereby having an overall cooling effect. Preliminary estimates of the impact of these rules show a negligible effect on global mean temperatures — a change of only a few hundredths of a degree. But reliable assessments of aerosol emissions rely on networks of mostly volunteer-driven efforts, and it could be a year or more before the full data from 2023 are available.

Woops?
And score one for geo engineering?